It started with the earliest screenings to specialist bloggers and has continued through to the mainstream press viewings: Dark Knight Rises is getting amazing reviews. Sharp, emotional, exciting – it looks to be an astonishing end to Christopher Nolan's reverent, faithful and stylish movie trilogy.

And this is just the latest in a series of comic book translations that have shown how Hollywood now understands the medium and its audience. Ten years ago, superhero films were mostly pretty awful – the risible Daredevil, the dull Fantastic Four, the shoddy Catwoman; all of them cynical exercises in cross-platform marketing with little understanding of the source material. But over the last decade there has been a significant power shift within the major studios. The cigar-chomping old guard has cleared out of the genre in favour of young chancers who grew up reading and loving comics. The big players today are the likes of JJ Abrams, Joss Whedon and Damon Lindelof, geeks who get the culture and respect it – and who also know that their time had come; just as auteurs such as Coppola, Scorsese and Ashby did in the seventies, when Hollywood last lost its connection with audiences.

And the world is ready to respond to the idea of Nietzschean mega personas saving us from untold evil. Superhero comics have always been a form of mythology, and mythology is about understanding the world when nothing makes sense. The rise of terrorism and cybercrime, and the collapse of the global economy, have led us to question the fundaments of society and causality – we don't know who the bad guys are anymore. Are they men with AK-47s, training to deliver death in some desert somewhere, or are they bankers, writing off billions with the flick of a Montblanc fountain pen? The classic super villain – ambiguous, malleable, unknowable – provides the perfect screen representation of these unfocused but potent collective fears.

So where does this leave games? On Monday, I chaired a discussion on the state of games journalism at Bafta, and during the talk the question came up – are games mainstream? Obviously, in terms of annual revenue, they are huge, and social titles such as Farmville have broadened the audience by many millions. But have they really secured a place in the cultural agenda? Are they taken seriously on television, in newspapers and on the big screen?

I don't think so. Not yet. And I think the extreme paucity of good (or even bearable) game movies tells us a lot about where the medium sits in the zeitgeist. Despite masterworks such as Bioshock and Portal, the stereotype of brainless blasters for juvenile boys remains. Meanwhile, the people who play Farmville and Bejeweled in their multimillions don't consider themselves as gamers, at least not in the same way they would think of themselves as readers or TV viewers. And the big successes that advertise our medium to the world – Call of Duty, Gears of War, Fifa – do little to challenge the assumption that interactive entertainment is an enclave of teenage male fantasy.

The thing is, comics were here a few years ago. The art form still exists in a sub-culture, but it has become acceptable – it's edgy, it's the good end of geekness. By embracing humour and vulnerability, writers have been able to branch out from the staple readership; the Avengers is really a movie about friendship and insecurity – it's The Breakfast Club with muscles. The Dark Knight trilogy is about trauma, vengeance and madness; it is the stages of grief hurled through a maelstrom of action. We can all relate, we can all understand. And that is why it can be both a meaningful piece of art and a consumerist event (Dark Knight Rises is for example, going to see the screening of the first-ever interactive cinema ad, in which the cheers of the audience will be picked up to decide the narrative arc of a Lynx commercial).

Contrast this with game movies. I don't understand Mortal Kombat or Paul Anderson's Resident Evil films. I mean, what are they saying? They are cinematic cut-scenes to a game no one would play. They are not events, they are tacit apologies.

The idea of superheroes had to be absorbed into the global consciousness before there could be really good, really mainstream superhero movies (I'd argue that despite the success, Tim Burton's Batman movies were cult flicks writ large). Slowly, the likes of Frank Miller's Dark Knight Returns and Alan Moore's Watchmen as well as likeable Superman TV shows such as Smallville and Lois & Clark engendered an acceptance of the superhero ideology. There's a long lineage leading to the comic book's dominance of mass cinema, and its a lineage games are still building.

Like it or not, Hollywood cinema is the touchpoint of western sensibilities – whatever we're feeling on a mass socio-cultural level tends to find itself depicted on the big screen. Forget about the complexities of portraying interactive games in linear narrative form – that's a red herring. If there was a will, Hollywood would do it, and do it well. And I think when that happens, when we get a massively entertaining Elder Scrolls, or Dead Space or Half-Life movies, that's when we'll know games are mainstream – whatever that means, and whatever it will cost us in the end.